The Wild

‘I wonder if there is an eleventh ship,’ Ivar Sarad said. ‘Can we be certain of this? I, myself, am not. The wave function can be interpreted in other ways.’

‘Do you think so?’ Shamir the Bold asked. ‘What ways?’

‘In the wake of our passing, the composition series could be inverted as a Gallivare space that would-’

‘That is unlikely,’ Li Te Mu Lan observed. ‘No one has ever proved the existence of a Gallivare space.’

Ivar Sarad regarded her coldly, suspiciously. ‘Well, then – perhaps it is a reflection? Perhaps the line wake of one of our ships is being reflected – Leopold Soli once said that, in the Vild, the manifold can flatten out as smooth and reflective as a mirror.’

Of course, Ivar Sarad was not the only pilot to doubt the existence of an eleventh ship. Sarolta Sen, Dolores Nun, and Leander of Darkmoon were wont to agree with Ivar Sarad, though for different and more common-sense reasons. But Rurik Boaz and Valin wi Tymon Whitestone sided with Li Te Mu Lan. Valin Whitestone was even selfless enough to propose that the others continue toward the Solid State Entity while he kleined backward along their pathway to seek out the eleventh ship. He would learn the identity of this mysterious eleventh pilot. If possible, he would then rejoin the others, who, by this time, would no doubt have shared in the glory of being the only pilots since Mallory Ringess to wrest great knowledge from the goddess that some called Kalinda the Wise.

Until this moment, Danlo had kept his silence. He was the youngest of the pilots, and so he thought it seemly to let the others take the lead in this conversation. Then, too, from his once and deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, who had remained in Neverness, he had learned the value of keeping secrets. But it was not right that he should keep important information from his fellow pilots. He couldn’t let the noble Valin Whitestone sacrifice himself for a mere secret, and so he said, ‘It is possible … that a ronin pilot guides the eleventh ship. Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, the ronin – you all know of him, yes? It is possible that he carries a warrior-poet into the Vild.’

In the pit of Danlo’s ship, the heads of the nine other pilots turned his way. Li Te Mu Lan and the Rosaleen, Rurik Boaz and Shamir the Bold, and the others – looked at him as if he were merely some journeyman pilot who had suffered his first intoxication with the number storm or the dreamtime. Finally, after they waited for him to explain this incredible statement, he told them of his encounter with Malaclypse Redring in Mer Tadeo’s garden.

‘It is possible,’ Leander of Darkmoon said. His massive head was flowing with the golden curls of his long hair and beard. Indeed, like his name, there was something of the lion about him, and something of the lazy (and reckless) boy, as well. But he was a man who bored too easily, and so when Danlo spoke of warrior-poets and the infamous Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, Leander was like a hungry man who had been fed a piece of dripping red meat. His eyes brightened, and in deep rumbling voice he said, ‘I knew Sivan before the great quest maddened him. He was a fine pilot, once a time. If anyone could follow us into the Entity, he could.’

After long, almost endless rounds of discussion, with their ships separated by half a million miles of space, above a rosy little star that no one bothered to name, the pilots agreed that Malaclypse Redring was likely following them, hoping, maybe, that the ten other pilots might lead him to Mallory Ringess, but there were other possibilities. As Leander of Darkmoon and Dolores Nun knew too well, it was possible for pilot to fall against pilot, to use his lightship as a sword, to manoeuvre close to another ship and slice open gaping holes into the manifold into which his enemy might fall. If these holes were made precisely – if the pilot could find a precise probability mapping – it was possible to cast an enemy ship down a dark, closed tube into the fiery heart of some nearby star. In the Pilots’ War, many had died this way. Sarolta Sen, in his ship the Infinite Tree, had once almost been destroyed thus, and so he was the first to observe that Malaclypse Redring might desire all their deaths. If the warrior-poets had a rule to slay all gods, they might also have a secret rule to slay any man or woman proud enough (or foolish enough) to attempt contact with a god. It would have been the simplest thing, as a precaution, for the pilots to turn back upon their pathways, to fall upon Malaclypse Redring and the lightship of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, even as a pack of wolves might discourage a great white bear from hunting them. In a moment, in a flash of light, they might easily have incinerated the warrior-poet. But this was not their way. That is, it was no longer their way. Leander of Darkmoon, although he loved war as well as any man could, was the first to propose that the pilots scatter across the Vild and approach the Solid State Entity along ten different pathways. That way Malaclypse Redring, inside Sivan’s ship, the Red Dragon, could only follow one of them. And so the pilots concluded their conclave and said their farewells. In the pit of the Snowy Owl, Danlo was once again alone. And then, upon Li Te Mu Lan’s signal (she was the oldest of the pilots and this was her right) the pilots scattered. They opened windows to the manifold and vanished like streaks of light bursting from a diamond sphere. Each pilot faced the manifold along her own chosen pathway; each pilot fell sightless and senseless of the ships of the others, and so each of them was finally and completely alone.

At first Danlo cherished this loneliness with a quiet joy, as he might have listened for the wind in a dark and silent wood. For the first time in many years he felt completely free. But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever, and so very quickly his elation gave way to the apprehension that he was not really alone after all. In almost no time, as he plunged deeper into the dark currents of the manifold, he descried the perturbations of another ship. A second ship – two ships remaining always within the same neighbourhood of stars. The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being; in this sense, two is life, and therefore it is death, for all life finds its conclusion in death, even as it feeds off the death of other things in order to stay alive. Although Danlo, for himself, feared dying less than did other men, he thought that he had seen enough of death to know it for what it truly is. Once, when he was nearly fourteen years old, he had buried all the eighty-eight people of the Devaki tribe which had adopted and raised him from a babe. He knew death too well, and he sensed that the warrior-poet who followed him might yet encompass the deaths of those who were beloved by him. Because he saw Malaclypse Redring as a harbinger of death (and because he thought he knew all of death that there was to know) he decided to escape this ghostly lightship that pursued him, much as a snowy owl might hunt a hare bounding over the snow. And so he emptied his mind of what lay behind him, and turned his inner eye to the deepest part of the manifold. There he would face the deepest part of the universe, the terrors and the joys.

At first, however, there was only joy. There was the cold beauty of the number storm, the many-faceted mathematical symbols that fell through his mind like frozen drops of light. There was the slowing of time and the consequent quickening of all his thoughts. And there was something else. Something other. It is something of a mystery that, although all pilots enter the manifold the same way and agree upon its essential nature, each man and woman will perceive it uniquely. For Danlo, as for no other pilot with whom he had ever spoken, the manifold shimmered with colours. Of course, in the absence of all light and spacetime, he knew that there could be no colour – but somehow, there were colours. He fell from star to star, beneath the stars of realspace, and entered a Kirrilian neighbourhood which glowed a deep cobalt blue, a hidden and secret blue the like of which he had never seen before. Soon he passed on to a common invariant space all pearl grey and touched with swirls of absinthe and rose. For a moment, he supposed that he might be lucky, that the rest of his journey toward the Entity might prove no more difficult than the straightforward mapping through such spaces. But in the Vild, piloting a lightship never remains easy or simple. Soon, in less than a moment, he entered a disorienting shear space, the kind of topological nightmare that the pilots sometimes call a Danladi inversion. Now the veils of the manifold were a bright azure, fading almost instantly to a pale turquoise, and then brightening again to an emerald green. The space all around him was like a strangely viewed painting in which figure and ground kept shifting into focus, forward and back, light and dark, inside and out. It was beautiful, in a way, but dangerous too, and so he was glad when this particular space began to break apart and branch out into a more or less normal decision tree. All pilots would wish that the manifold held nothing more complicated than such trees, where all decisions take on the simplest form: maximize/minimize, left/right, inside/outside, yes/no. So simple was this tree that Danlo had a moment to build up a proof array of the Zassenhaus Butterfly Lemma of the Jordan-Holder Theorem. (That is to say, that any two composition series of a group G are isomorphic.) He took the time to reconsider this proof of ancient algebra because he had a notion of how it might be used in an escape mapping if he should ever be so unlucky as to enter an infinite tree.

It is one of life’s ironies that most of what we fear never comes to pass, while many dangers – even killing dangers – will steal upon us by surprise. During all his time as a pilot, Danlo was to face no infinite trees. But then, just as he was leisurely defining the homomorphism, phi, the branch of the tree holding up his lightship suddenly snapped – this is how it seemed – and he was hurled into a rare and quite deadly torison space, of a kind that Lord Ricardo Lavi had once discovered on one of the first journeys toward the Vild. Suddenly, he was again very aware of colours. There were the quick violets of space suddenly folding, and the r-dimensional Betti numbers appearing as ruby, auburn, and chrome red. There were flashes of scarlet, as if all the other colours might momentarily catch on fire and fall past the threshold of finite folding into an infinite and blazing crimson. Space itself was twisting like a snowworm in a strong man’s hands, writhing and popping and twisting until it suddenly burst in an opening of violet into violet and began folding in upon itself. Now, for Danlo, there was true peril, danger inside of danger. Now – for a moment that might last no longer than half a beat of his heart – he floated in the pit of his ship, sweating and breathing deeply, and thought as quickly as it is possible for a man to think. He had little fear of death, but even so he dreaded being trapped alive inside a collapsing torison space. His dread was a red-purple colour, the colour of a blood tick squeezed between finger and thumb. He took no notice of this colour, however, nor did he give care or thought to himself. All his awareness – his racing mathematical mind and every strand of his will to live – spread out over the space before him. There were dark tunnels that kleined back and through themselves, impossibly complex, impossible to map through. There was the very fabric of the manifold itself, lavender like a fabulist’s robes, infolding upon itself through shades of amethyst, magenta, and deep purple, the one and true purple that might well be the quintessential colour that underlay all others. Everywhere, the manifold was falling in on itself like dark violet flowers blossoming backward in time, folding up petal inside petal, always infolding toward that lightless singularity where the number of folds falls off to infinity. He might never have mapped free from such a space, but then he chanced to remember a certain colour. In truth, he willed himself to summon up a perfect blue-black hue that suffused his mind the way that the night fills the late evening sky. His will to live was strong, and his memory of colours, images, words, whispers and love was even stronger. His memory for such things was almost perfect, and so it happened that he willed himself to behold a deep, deep blue inside blue, the colour of his mother’s eyes. His mother had been one of the finest scryers there had ever been, able to see the infinitely complex web of connections between nowness and time to come. The greatest scryers will always find their way into the future; in the end, they choose which future and fate will be. Although Danlo was no scryer, not yet, he remembered how perfectly the colour of his mother’s eyes matched his own. ‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ his grandfather, Leopold Soli had once told him. Long ago, before he was born, his mother had blinded herself as the scryers do so that she might perceive the future more clearly. Now, in the pit of his ship, even as he plunged downward toward the torison space’s hideous singularity, Danlo closed his eyes tightly and tried to behold their blueness from within. He remembered, then, an important theorem of elementary topology. He saw it instantly as a perfect jewel, like a lightstone, a deep, dark, liquid blue holding a secret light. It was the first conservation theorem, which proved that for every simplicial mapping, the image of the boundary is equal to the boundary of the image. Almost instantly, he seized upon this theorem as a starving man might grasp a gobbet of meat. He knew that he could apply it toward mapping out of the torison space. And so he did. Before the lens of his mind’s eye, he summoned up arrays of ideoplasts and made his proof. He was perhaps the first pilot in the history of the Order to prove that a collapsing torison space might remain open. (Even if that opening quickly fell off toward an infinitesimal.) He made a mapping, and he fell through, and suddenly there was the light of a star. The Snowy Owl fell out into realspace, into realtime, into the glorious golden light of a star that he named Shona Oyu, or, the Bright Eye. This was to be the first of the miraculous escapes from the manifold that he would make on his journey toward the Solid State Entity.

In this way, falling from star to star, falling in and out of the manifold beneath the stars, he continued on his journey. Because he wished to be the first of the ten pilots to reach the Entity (and because he hoped to elude the warrior-poet who might still be following him), he fell across the stars as quickly as a pilot may fall. As the Sonderval had said in Mer Tadeo’s garden, all quests are really the same. His quest to seek out his father and find the lost planet Tannahill was connected to the great quest twenty-five years past to find that infinite store of knowledge known as the Elder Eddas. And that quest was merely a continuation of all quests throughout time and history. Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannahs of Afarique on Old Earth. In the pilots of the Order, this urge to know the unknowable most often finds itself in a terrible restlessness, an instinct and will to fall through space, to move ever outward across the universe, always seeking. Some pilots seek black holes, or ringworlds built by ancient aliens, or strange, new stars. Some pilots still look for the hypothesized dark matter of the universe, the mysterious matter that no one has ever found. Some pilots seek God. But all pilots, if they are worthy of their pilots’ rings, seek movement for the sake of movement itself. The dance of lightship from star to star, from the translucent windows into the manifold that give out onto the stars – this urge to fall ever outward toward the farthest galaxies is sometimes called the westering. Sometimes, too, the pilots refer to this manner of journey as fenestering, for to fall quickly from star to star, one must align the stellar windows artfully and with great precision. Although Danlo was not yet a master of this art of interfenestration, the westering urge was strong in him. Westering/fenestering, fenestering/westering – to a young pilot such as Danlo, the two words were the same, and so he made successive mappings through hundreds of crystal-like windows. And with every window he passed through there was a moment of stillness and a clarity, as of starlight illuminating a perfect diamond pane. And yet there was always the anticipation of other windows yet to come, always newness, always strangeness, always the opening outward onto the clear light of universe. Falling through a window into realspace was sometimes like falling into an entirely different universe, for there was always a shift in the perception of the galaxy, and thus splendid vistas of stars never seen before. Some pilots believe that if they could fenester through an infinite number of windows, then their westering flight would eventually bring them to a place where all time and space folds inward upon itself. They call this singularity Hell, for there the manifold would become infinitely dense and impenetrable. Danlo thought of it simply as the Blessed Realm, the centre of the universe itself. Once, he had hoped to reach such a place. He remembered that this had been his reason for becoming a pilot, his passion, his love, his fate. But now he had abandoned this dream, just as he had left behind many dreams of his childhood. Now there were many windows, only they did not lead into the centre of all things but rather into the heart of a goddess. One by one, he passed through thousands of windows. They sparkled like snowflakes in an endless field, and fenestering through them was like racing on a sled over sheets of new snow.

And so he fell across the galaxy. If his ship had been able to move at lightspeed through normal space, his journey would have required some three thousand years. This, he thought, was a very long time. Three thousand years ago, the Order had yet to make its move from Arcite to Neverness, and the woman who would one day transform herself into the Solid State Entity had yet to be born. Three thousand years before, somewhere in the regions that he passed through, it was said that an insane god had killed itself in the spectacular manner of throwing itself into a star, thereby blowing it up in an incandescent funeral pyre and creating the first of the Vild’s supernovae. In a galaxy as apocalyptic as the Milky Way, three thousand years was almost forever, and yet, to a pilot locked inside the pit of a lightship, there were other eternities of time more immediate and more oppressive. Danlo, who was a creature of wind and sun, sometimes hated the darkness in which he lay. When he faced away from the ship-computer and the brilliant number storm, he hated the damp, acid smell of the neurologics surrounding him, the acrid stench of his unwashed body, and the carbon-dioxide closeness of his own breath. When he faced the manifold, was all colour, fire, and light. But too much pleasure will be felt as pain, and after many days of journeying, he came to dread even these exaltations of the mind. Above all things, he longed for clean air and movement beneath the open sky. Although he fell across the stars as quickly as most pilots have ever fallen, his westering rush took much intime, the inner, subjective time of his blood, belly and brain. Sometimes, during rare moments of acceptance and affirmation, he loved being a pilot as much as any man ever has, yet he hated it, too, and he longed for a quicker way of journeying. Often, over the millions of seconds of his quest, he thought about the Great Theorem – the Continuum Hypothesis – which states that there exists a pair of simply connected point-sources in the neighbourhood of any two stars. His father had been the first to prove this theorem, the first pilot to fall across half the galaxy from Perdido Luz to the Star of Neverness in a single fall. Danlo knew, as all pilots now knew, that it was possible to fall between any two stars almost instantly. (Perhaps, Danlo thought, it would even be possible to fall into the very centre of the Blessed Realm, if such a heaven truly existed.) It was possible to fall anywhere in the universe, yes, but it was not always possible to find such a mapping. In truth, for most pilots, it was hideously difficult. A few pilots, such as the Sonderval and Vrenda Chu, were sometimes genius enough to discover such point-to-point mappings and use the Great Theorem as it should be used. But even they must usually journey as Danlo did now, scurfing the windows of the manifold window by window, star by star, day by endless day. The further toward the Entity that Danlo fell – sometimes down pathways as complex as a nest of writhing snakes – the harder he tried to make sense of the Great Theorem and apply it toward finding an instantaneous mapping. He wished to fall out around a famous, red star inside the Entity. He wished to make planetfall, to climb out of his ship and rest on the sands of a wide, sunny beach. He wished these things for the sake of his soul, with all the force of his will. And yet, there was another reason that he played with the logic and intricacies of the Great Theorem. A very practical reason. At need, Danlo could be the most practical of men, and so, when he passed by a neutron star very near the spaces of the Entity and detected once again the ghost image of Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian’s ship, he couldn’t help dreaming of falling away instantly, falling far and finally away from the warrior-poet who pursued him. This, however, was still a dream. He could not see the simple secret of applying the Great Theorem. And so he could not lose the two men inside the lightship called the Red Dragon, any more than he could have left behind his shadow by fleeing away from the rising sun.

During those times when the manifold flattened out and grew becalmed like a tropical sea, two activities saved him from feeling trapped in the pit of his ship. From his father, he had inherited an old, leather-bound book of poems. It was one of his few treasures, and he kept it in a wooden chest that he had been given as a novice. When he faced away from the manifold and floated in darkness, he liked to read these ancient poems, to let their rhythms and sounds ring in his memory like the music of golden bells. Sometimes he would recite other poems and songs not in his book; sometimes he would compose his own songs and set them to music. For Danlo, music was as wine to other men, and he always took great joy in singing the chants of his childhood, or listening in his mind to the Taima’s Hymns to the Night, or above all, in playing his skauhachi. This bamboo flute was perhaps the greatest of the gifts anyone had given him, and he loved to lift it out of the chest and play until his lips ached and his lungs burned with fire. The songs he made were sometimes sad, but just as often they resonated with sheer joy. He played to the marvel and the mystery of the universe. And always he played with a love of life that connected him to the past, to the present, and to the golden, shimmering future.

On the ninety-ninth day of his journey, as his ship’s clock measured time, he came at last to the threshold of the Solid State Entity. The Snowy Owl fell out into realspace around a large white star. Danlo reached out with his great telescopes and drank in a sight that few pilots had ever seen. Before him, hanging in the blackness of space, a cloud of a hundred thousand stars burned dimly through veils of glowing hydrogen gas. There was much interstellar dust, too much for him to penetrate this dark, forbidding nebula by sight alone. Soon, perhaps in moments, he would have to enter the nebula itself to see it as it was. For millennia, of course, pilots have entered the galaxy’s many nebulae, but this cluster of stars was different from any other, for it contained the body and brain of a goddess.

In a way, the entire nebula was the Entity’s brain, or rather, Her brain was spread out over this vast region of stars. It troubled Danlo to conceive of such a vast intelligence, woven into great clumps of matter that weren’t really organic brains at all, but rather more like computers. Some of the Order’s professionals – the eschatologists, for example – still consider the Entity to be nothing more than a huge computer made up of component units the size of moons. Millions of perfect, shining, spherical moon-brains that pulsed with information and thoughts impossible for a mere man to think. No one knew how many of these moon-brains there were. As many as a thousand spheres spun in their orbits around some of the larger stars. The moon-brains fed on photons and absorbed gamma and X-rays and radiation – the very exhalation and breath of the stars. The Entity, if she possessed such sentiments, must have regarded every part of the nebula as an extension of Her godly body. At the least, She must have claimed all the nebula’s matter – the millions of planets, asteroids, dust particles, clouds of gas, and stars – as food to live on, nourishment to sustain Her tremendous energies and to enable Her to grow. During the last three millennia, it was said, this goddess had grown from a simple human being into an Entity that nearly filled a nebula one hundred light-years in diameter. No one knew if the Entity was still growing, but it was almost certain that Her use of energy was growing exponentially. Much of this energy, it was thought, She applied to the manipulation of matter and spacetime, the reaching out of Her godly hand to cark Her designs upon the universe. Much energy was needed simply so that She could organize Her mind and communicate with Herself. The moon-brains were grouped around the nebula’s stars, and these stars were sometimes separated by many light-years of space. Any signal, such as a radio or a light wave propagated through realspace, would have taken years to fall from brain-lobe to brain-lobe. To connect the millions of lobes would mean millions of years of glacial, lightspeed signal exchange; for the Entity to complete a single thought might have required a billion years. And so the Entity employed no such signals to integrate Her mind. The mechanics hypothesize that She generates tachyons, these ghostly, theoretical particles whose slowest velocity approaches the speed of light. This, the mechanics say, must be the reason why She seeks such great energies. Impossible energies. The trillions of miles of black space between the Entity’s many stars must have burned with streams of tachyons, information streams infinitely faster than light, impossible to detect, but almost possible to imagine: when Danlo closed his eyes, he could almost see all spacetime lit up with numinous ruby rays, shimmering with a great, golden consciousness. Somewhere before him, in this dark, strange nebula that he hesitated to enter, there must be interconnecting beams of tachyons carrying the codes of mysterious information, linking up the moon-brains almost instantaneously, weaving through empty space an unseen but vast and glorious web of pure intelligence.

At last, when Danlo could stand it no longer, he made a mapping, and began falling among the stars of the Entity. Almost immediately upon entering these forbidden spaces – after he had passed a great bloody sun twice as large as Scutarix – he sensed that in some deep way, the Entity was aware of him. Perhaps She wrought trillions of telescopes out of carbon and common matter and connected these to each of her moon-brains. Perhaps she continually swept the drears of space for anything that moved, much as a peshwi bird watches the forests near Neverness for furflies. Almost certainly. She, too, could read the perturbations that a lightship makes upon the manifold. Danlo thought of this as he segued in and out of complex decision trees, star after star, scudding through spaces fouled with too many zero-points, which were like drops of blacking oil carelessly spilled into a glass of wine. As he fell deeper into the Entity he saw evidence of Her control of spacetime and matter everywhere.

He saw, too, signs of war. At least, the pulverized planets and ionized dust that he fell through seemed as if it could have been the flotsam and debris of some godly war. Perhaps the Entity was at war with Herself. Perhaps She was destroying Herself, tearing Herself apart, planet by planet, atom by atom, always assembling and reassembling these elements into something new. With his ship’s radio telescopes and scanning computers, Danlo searched through many solar systems. He searched for the familiar matter of the natural world: omnipresent hydrogen, poisonous oxygen, friendly carbon. Floating in the blackness around the stars were other elements, too, giddy helium, quick and treacherous mercury, noble gold. All these elements – and others – he catalogued, as well as the compounds of silicates and salts and ice made from them. He noticed immediately that there were too many transuranic elements, from plutonium and fermium on up through the actinide series into the wildly unstable atoms that none of the Order’s physicists had ever managed to synthesize. And there was something else. Some other kind of matter. Near the coronas of certain stars – usually medium-sized singlets orbited by five or more gas giant planets – there were shimmering curtains of matter atomically no denser than platinum or gold. Danlo could not tell if this matter was solid or liquid. (Or perhaps even some kind of rare plasma gas.) At times, as seen from across ten million miles of space, it took on the flowing brilliance of quicksilver and all the colours of gold. Some of this matter was as light as lithium; indeed, it astonished Danlo to discover various elements whose atomic weights seemed to be less than that of hydrogen. This, he knew, was impossible. That is, it was impossible for any atoms that the physicists had ever hypothesized to betray such properties. Danlo immediately sensed that the Entity was creating new types of matter that had never before existed in the universe. Neither his telescopes nor his computers nor all his physical theories could understand such godly stuff. He guessed that the Entity must have discovered the secret of completely decomposing matter and rebuilding it from the most fundamental units, from the infons and strings that some mechanics say all protons and neutrons are ultimately made of. Perhaps She was trying to create a better material for the neurologics of Her brains, and thus, a better substrate for pure mind. It amused Danlo to think that She might merely be planning for the future. The very far future. All protons will eventually decay into positrons and pions, and thus it is said that the entire universe will evaporate away into light in only some ten thousand trillion trillion trillion more years. Perhaps the Entity had crafted a finer kind of matter more stable than protons, much as clary and other plastics will withstand the rot of a dark forest much longer than mere wood. If gods or goddesses possessed the same will to live as did human beings, then surely they would create for themselves golden, immortal bodies that would never decay or die.

Danlo wondered if She might use this godstuff to create more highly organized types of matter: complex molecules, cells, life itself. He did not think so. Because Danlo did not know what this matter could be (and because no mechanic of the Order had ever had the pleasure of analysing such bizarre stuff), he decided to collect some to show to his friends.

It should have been a simple thing, this collection of artificial matter. It was simple to send out robots from his ship to scoop up litres of godstuff, but it was also quite dangerous. For first there would come the difficult and dangerous manoeuvring of his ship close to a nearby white star. He named this star Kalinda’s Glory. He would have to make difficult mappings to point-exits almost within the white-blue corona of Kalinda’s Glory. He would have to enter the manifold in the spaces very near a large star. And then he must fall out into temperatures almost hot enough to melt the diamond hull of his ship. And still he must then rocket through realspace until he came upon a pocket of artificial matter. Only then could he stow the godstuff safely within the hold of his ship. Only then could he fall back into the cool and timeless flow of the manifold and continue on his journey.

From the instant that he opened a window to the manifold in order to complete this minor mission, he knew something was wrong. Instantly, the Snowy Owl was sucked into a grey-black chaos space wholly unfamiliar to him. This space should not have been where it was. Perhaps it should not have existed at all. He should have opened a window that led to another window directly to a third window giving out into the blazing blue corona of Kalinda’s Glory. Instead, his ship plunged into a whirlpool of what almost looked like a Lavi space, only darker, blacker, and too dense with zero-points, like sediments in an old wine. Almost immediately, his mappings began to waver like a mirage over a frozen sea, and then – unbelievably – he lost the correspondences altogether. He lost his mapping. This was one of the most dangerous of misfortunes that might befall a pilot. He began tunnelling through a mapless space seemingly without beginning or end. For a while, as he sweated and prayed and told himself lies, he hoped that this might prove no more complex than a normal Moebius space. But the further he fell from any point-exit near Kalinda’s Glory, the nearer he came to despair. For almost certainly he had never escaped from such a chaos. Perhaps no pilot had, he was lost in chaos. No pilot, as far as he knew, had ever faced pure chaos before; Danlo had always been taught that a fundamental mathematical order underlay all the seeming bifurcations and turbulence of the manifold. Now he was not so sure. Now, all about him almost crushing his ship, the chaos space began folding and squeezing him toward a zero-point. It was almost like being caught on a Koch snowflake, the crystal points within points, fractalling down to zero. For a while, even as he lost himself (and his ship) in a cloud of billions of such snowflakes, he marvelled at the infinite self-embedding of complexity. He might easily have lost himself in these infinities altogether if his will to escape hadn’t been so strong. Although it might prove hopeless, he tried to model the chaos and thus make a map through this impossible part of the manifold.

For his first model, he tried a simple generation of the Mandelbrot set, the iteration in the complex plane of the mapping z into z

+ c, where c is a complex number. When this proved futile, he generated other sets, Lavi sets and Julia sets and even Soli sets of quaternion-fields on a mutated thickspace. All to no avail. After a while, as his ship spun endlessly and fell through an almost impenetrable iron grey, he abandoned such mathematics and fell back upon the metaphors and words for chaos that he had learned as a child. He was certain that he would soon die, and so why not take a moment’s comfort where he could? He emptied his mind, then, of ideoplasts and other mathematical symbols. He remembered a word for coldness, eesha-kaleth, the coldness before snow. Now that he had finished sweating, as he waited for the chaos storm to intensify and kill him, his whole body felt cold and strange. In the pit of his ship, he lay naked, shivering, and he remembered the moratetha, the death clouds of his childhood that would steal across the sea and swallow up entire islands in an ice-fog of whiteness where there was no up or down, inside or out, yesterday or tomorrow. The chaos surrounding him was something like such a morateth. But even more, in its fierce turbulence, in its whorls, eddies, and vortices of fractured spaces breaking at his ship, it was like a sarsara, the Serpent’s Breath: the death wind that had killed so many of his people. It would be an easy thing, he knew, to let the chaos storm overcome him, even as the overpressures of a sarsara might fall upon a solitary hunter and drive him down into the ice. Then he could finally join his tribe in death. But the oldest teaching of his people was that a man should die at the right time, and something inside him whispered that he mustn’t die, not yet. As he lay in the icy darkness of his ship, as he touched the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, all the while shivering and remembering, something was calling him to life. It was a long, dark, terrible sound, perhaps the very sound and fury of chaos itself. And then, in the centre of the chaos, there was a blackness as bright as the pupil of his eye. There were secret colours, bands of brilliant orange encircling the blackness, and then white, a pure snowy whiteness. All the colours of chaos were inside him, and out, and so again he faced his ship’s computer and turned his inner eye toward the manifold.

Before him, beneath the stars of the Solid State Entity, within the dark, twisting tunnels of a phase space, there was an attractor. It was a strange attractor, he decided: stable, non-periodic, low-dimensional. Its loops and spirals would weave infinitely deep, infinitely many fractal pathways inside a finite space. No path would ever cross or touch any other. Strange attractors, it was hypothesized, were the black holes of the manifold. Nothing that approached one too closely could escape its infinities. For a pilot to enter a strange attractor would mean spiralling down endless pathways into blackness and neverness. Any sane pilot would have fled such an attractor. Danlo considered such a course, but where would he flee to and into what dread space might he flee? Strangely, he felt the attractor pulling him, almost calling him, in the way that the future called all life into its glorious destiny. He couldn’t deny this call. And so there came a moment when he faced the attractor and piloted his ship into the last place in the universe he would ever have thought to go. With this wordless affirmation made in the dark of his ship, a wildness came over him. His body began to warm as if he had somehow drunk the light of the sun. He felt his heart beating strong and fast. His blood surged quickly inside him, thousands upon thousands of unseen turbulent streams, flowing, bifurcating, surging, but always returning to the chambers of his heart. If chaos was anywhere, he thought, it was inside himself. And order was there, too. Chaos/order; order/chaos – for the first time in his life, he began to see the deep connection between these seemingly opposite forces. Chaos, he thought, was not the enemy of order, but rather the cataclysm that gave it birth. A supernova was a most violent, chaotic event, but out of this explosion into light were born carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and all the other elements of life. There was always a place where order might emerge from chaos. Danlo looked for this place within himself; and then he looked within the attractor which coiled before him like an infinite snake swallowing its tail and drew him ever onward. Suddenly he knew a thing. To find the hidden order inside, he must first become himself pure chaos. This was his genius, his joy, his fate. This was his magical thinking approach to mathematics, nurtured by the shamans of his tribe, crystallized and polished in the cold halls of the Academy on Neverness. He must will himself to see where pattern is born of formlessness, that pattern that connects. All his life he had been trained to see such patterns. There was always a choice, to see or not see. Now, inside the attractor that pulled him into its writhing coils, there were patterns. There were ripples and billowings and depthless fractal boundaries like the wall clouds around the eye of a hurricane. The attractor itself swirled with the colours of orange madder and a pale, icy blue. For the first time, he marvelled at the attractor’s strange and terrible beauty. There was something haunting in the self-referential aspect of the chaos functions, the way that the functions lay embedded inside one another, watching and waiting and making patterns down to infinity. There were always an infinite number of patterns to choose from, always the infinite possibilities. There was always a possible future; it was only a matter of finding the right pattern, of sorting, inverting, mapping, and making the correspondences, and then comparing the patterns to a million other patterns that he had seen. Now, as the patterns before him fractured into lovely crimson traceries and then coalesced a moment later into a clear blue-black pool that pulled him ever inward, he must choose one pattern and only one. In less than a second of time, in a fraction of a fraction of a moment that would always be the eternal Now, he would have to make his choice. There could be no putting it off once it came. His choice: he could be pulled screaming into his fate, or he could say yes to the chaos inside himself and choose his future. This, he remembered, is what the scryers do. This is what his mother must have done in finding the terrible courage to give birth to him. And so at last, when his moment came and time was now and always and forever, he chose a simple pattern. He made a mapping into this strange, strange attractor, and then he fell alone into the eye of chaos where all was stillness, silence, and beautiful, blessed light.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_6ff2ee1d-9c27-564c-abd9-b14210e71c02)

Ancestral Voices (#ulink_6ff2ee1d-9c27-564c-abd9-b14210e71c02)

The ability to remember the past gives one the power to descry events that have yet to be. This is the great problem of consciousness, for man and god, this awareness in time: the more clearly we visualize the future, the more we live in dread that it will inevitably become the present.

– from ARequiem For Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh

Danlo fell out near a small yellow star as beautiful as any star he had ever seen. The star was circled by nine fat round planets, one of which was very near to him indeed. Below his lightship – a bare ten thousand miles below the Snowy Owl – there spun a planet all green and blue and swaddled in layers of bright white clouds. He could scarcely believe his good fortune. It seemed too much of a miracle to have escaped an inescapable attractor, only to then fall out above such a lovely and earthlike planet. In the pit of his ship he lay shaking with triumph and joy, and he opened a window in the ship’s hull to look out over this unnamed planet. For a long time he looked down through space at mossy brown continents and sparkling blue oceans. With his scanning computers, he analysed the gases of the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide involved in the interflow of organic life. He did this to reassure himself that he had really fallen out into realspace, and so he reached out with his telescopes and scanners and eyes to embrace it, to touch it, to see it as it truly was. In the sweep of the planet’s mountains, in the fractal curves of the continents’ coastlines and the shape of the vast oceans, he became aware of a pattern hauntingly familiar to him. At first he could not identify this pattern. But then he searched his memory, and there was a shock of recognition, like suddenly beholding the face of a friend who has returned from the wounds and scars of old age into an untouched and marvellous youth. It astonished him that the face of the planet below him matched his brilliant memory so exactly; it was an astonishing thing to discover here in the heart of the Solid State Entity a planet that must be, that could only be that great and glorious planet that men remembered as Old Earth.

It cannot be, he thought. It is not possible.

The planet was Earth; and yet it was not Earth. It was a pristine, primeval Earth untouched by war or the insanity of the Holocaust, an Earth somehow healed of its terrible wounds. Its atmosphere bore no trace of the fluorocarbons or chloride plastics or plutonium that he would have expected to find there. As he saw through his telescopes, the oceans teemed with life and were free of oil slicks or the taint of garbage. Far below him, on the grassy veldts of a continent that looked like Afarique, there were herds of antelope and prides of lions, and an animal that looked much like a horse but was covered from nose to tail with vivid white and black stripes. There were trees. There were trees! Parts of every continent, save the southernmost, were covered in unbroken swathes of brilliant green forests. Such an Earth might have existed fifty thousand years ago or fifty thousand years in the future, but it was hard to understand how this beautiful planet had come to be here now. As Danlo well knew, if Old Earth still existed it must lay some eight thousand light-years coreward along the Orion Arm, in the spaces near Sahasrara and Anona Luz. It was impossible, he thought, that even a goddess might have arms strong enough or long enough to move a whole planet fifty thousand trillion miles through a dangerous and star-crossed space. Still gazing through his telescopes, he wondered if he was really seeing anything through his telescopes. The Entity, it was said, could directly manipulate any type of matter through countless miles of realspace, through the force of Her will and Her thoughts alone. Perhaps the Entity, even at this moment, was manipulating the molecules of his mind, subtly pulling at his neurons, much as a musician might pluck the strings of a gosharp. What unearthly tunes, he wondered, might a vastly greater mind play upon his consciousness? What otherworldly visions might a true goddess cause a man to see?

After a very long time of thinking such deep thoughts and brooding over the nature of reality, Danlo decided he must accept the sensation of his eyes as true vision and his computer’s analyses of the planet’s carbon cycles as true information, even though he feared that his sense of interfacing his ship computer (and everything else) might be an almost perfect simulation of reality that the Entity had somehow carked into his mind. He had no objective reason for making such an affirmation. It occurred to him that just as he had penetrated the spaces of the Entity to fall out inside Her very brain, in some way, as with an information virus or an ohrworm. She might be inside the onstreaming consciousness of his brain. And the image of himself as pilot who had penetrated the living substance of a goddess might be, at this moment, one of Her deepest thoughts, and suddenly this looking inside himself to apprehend the reality of who lay inside whom was like holding a mirror before a silver mirror and looking down into an infinite succession of smaller mirrors as they almost vanished into a dazzling, singular point.

Because he could not tell inside from out, for an endless moment, he was nauseous and dizzy. It occurred to him that perhaps he had not escaped the attractor after all. Perhaps he was still falling through the black ink of the manifold, falling and falling through the endless nightmares and hallucinations of a pilot who has gone mad. Or perhaps he was still on the planet of his birth; perhaps he was still thirteen years old, still lost in the wind and ice of the sarsara, the great mother storm that had nearly killed him out on the frozen sea before he had come to Neverness. It was possible, he thought, that he had never really reached Neverness or become a pilot. Perhaps he had only dreamed the last nine years of his life. He might be dreaming still. As bubbles rise through dark churning waters, his mind might only be creating dream images of his deepest friend, Hanuman li Tosh, he of the hellish blue eyes and broken soul who had once betrayed him. Who would betray him, who was always staring at Danlo with his death-haunted eyes even as he seared open in Danlo a wound of lightning and blood and memory, the deep and primeval wound that would not be healed. Perhaps the wind had driven Danlo to the ice at last, and at this moment he lay down against terrible cold, frozen and lost in dreams of the future, dreaming his life, dreaming his death. He would never really know. He could never know, and that was the terrifying and paradoxical nature of reality, that if he thought about it too much or looked at it too deeply, it all began to seem somehow unreal.

But I do know, Danlo thought. Iknow that I know.

Somewhere inside him, beyond his mentations or the impulses of his brain, there was a deeper knowledge. Somehow, without the mediation of his mind, all the cells of his body were gravid with a vast and ancient intelligence, and each individual cell felt the pull of the planet beneath him. Every atom of his body, it seemed, recognized this planet and remembered it. At last he decided that he would no longer doubt this deep sense of reality. He knew that this wandering Earth was real, that he was truly seeing the polar icecaps and the grey-green northern rainforests for what they were. At all costs, he would will himself to affirm what he knew as true and this affirmation of his vision and the whisper of his cells was the full flowering of his truth sense, that mysterious and marvellous consciousness that all people and all things possess.

If this Earth is real, then it has a real origin in spacetime. It is possible that this Earth has not been brought here across space – it is possible that She has created it.

With this thought, a beam of laser light flashed up from the planet’s surface through the atmosphere out into space. His telescopes intercepted this intense, coherent light. There was no information bound within this signal that his computers could decode. But the very phenomenon of laser light streaming up from a densely-forested coastline was itself a kind of signal and a kind of information. For the first time, he wondered if human beings might live on this Earth. It seemed only natural that they would. He remembered that his father, on his first journey into the Entity, had discovered a world full of men and women who could not believe that they lived their entire lives inside a stellar nebula rippling with a godly intelligence. Of course, Danlo had seen no cities below him, no mud huts nor pyramids nor domes nor other signs of human life. It was possible that the men of this Earth might live as hunters beneath the canopies of the vast emerald forests. If this was so, then he would never see them from a lightship floating in the near space above their world. Because he was lonely and eager for the sound of human voices – and because he was unbearably curious – he decided to take his ship down through the atmosphere to discover the source of this mysterious laser light.

He fell to Earth down through the exosphere and stratosphere, and then he guided his ship through the billowing (and blinding) layers of clouds of the troposphere. The Snowy Owl fell down into the gravity well of the planet, and Danlo was very glad that he had become the pilot of a lightship, those great, gleaming, winged ships that can fall not only between the stars, but also rocket up and down through the thickest atmospheres. Lightships can fall almost anywhere in the universe, and that was the glory of piloting such a ship, to be as fast and free as a ray of light. And so he fell down and down through dense grey clouds, homing on the place where the laser beam had originated. On a broad sandy beach at the edge of one of the continents he made planetfall. He wasted no time analysing the viruses and bacteria which everywhere swam through this planet’s moist winds and oceans. He had not come this far to be killed by a virus. In truth, it is hideously difficult to predict the effects of alien viruses on the human body, and many pilots disdain the dubious results of animal tests or computer simulations or other means of determining what is safe and what is not. For many pilots, the true test of an alien biosphere’s lethality is in walking along alien soil and breathing alien air. And this was no alien planet, as Danlo reminded himself. It was Earth. Or rather, it was an Earth, a world of ancient trees and sea otters and snails – and all the other kinds of life that would be as familiar and friendly to him as the bacteria that lived inside his belly.

Therefore Danlo broke open the pit of his ship and fairly fell down to the soft beach sands. It dismayed him to discover that after many days of weightlessness inside his ship, his body was a little weak. Although the pits of all lightships are designed to induce micro-gravities along a pilot’s torso and limbs, these intense fields do not quite keep the muscles from shrinking or the bones from demineralizing. As Danlo took his first tentative steps, he found that his slightly wasted leg muscles at first would support him only with difficulty and considerable pain. But then he stood away from his ship, and his bare feet seemed to draw strength from the soft, cold touch of the sand. He stood straight and still, looking down the broad sweep of the beach. To his left, the great grey ocean roared and surged and broke upon the hardpack at the water’s edge. To his right, a dark green forest of fir trees flowed like an ocean of a different kind, toward the east and south, and northwards where it swelled up into a headland of rocks and steeply rising hills. There was also something else. Just above the foredunes and beach grasses, where the sand gave way to the towering trees, there was a house. It was a small chalet of shatterwood beams and granite stone, and Danlo suddenly remembered that he knew this house quite well.

No, no, it is not possible.

He stood staring up at this lovely house for a while, and then the cold wind blew in from the ocean and drowned him in memories. Soon he began shaking and shivering. The wind found his belly, and he was suddenly cold as if he had drunk an ocean of ice water. He looked down at his lean, ivory legs quivering in the cold. He was still as naked as a pilot in the pit of his ship, but now that he stood on soft shifting sands, he realized that he was naked to the world. Because he needed to protect himself from the bitter wind and cover his nakedness, he returned to his ship to fetch his boots, his heavy wool cloak, and the racing kamelaika he had once worn while skating the streets of Neverness.

My mind is naked to Her. My memories, my mind.

The Entity, he thought, could read his memories exactly enough to incarnate them as wood and stone – either that or She could make him see this unforgettable house out of his memory where no house really existed. But because he thought that the little white house beneath the forest must be real, he quickly left his ship and returned to the beach. He began trudging up the dunes, the fine sands slipping beneath his boots and his weakened muscles. He worked his way forward and up against the pull of the Earth as if he were drunk on strong alcoholic spirits. Soon, however, with every step taken as he drew nearer the house, he began to acclimatize to the planet’s gravity. He remembered how to walk on treacherous sands. He remembered other things as well. Once, in this simple house of white granite that he could now see too well, there had been long nights of passion and love and happiness. Once, a woman had lived here, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, she of the great heart and broken life whom he had loved and lost. But she had fled this house. In truth, she had fled Danlo and his burning memories. It was said that she had even fled Neverness for the stars. Although Danlo did not think it was possible that she could have found her way to this mysterious planet deep within the Solid State Entity, he hurried up the beach straight towards this house to discover what (or who) lay inside.

Tamara, Tamara – in this house you promised to marry me.

At last, on top of a small, grass-covered hill, at the end of a path laid with flat sandstones, he came up to the house’s door. It was thick and arched and sculpted out of shatterwood, a dense black wood native only to islands on the planet Icefall. Shatterwood trees had never grown on Old Earth, and so it was a mystery how the Entity had found shatterwood with which to build this house. He reached out to touch the door. The wood was cold and hard and polished to an impossible smoothness in the way that only shatterwood can be polished. He traced his finger across the lovely grain of the door, remembering. Somehow the Entity had exactly duplicated the door of Tamara’s house. In Danlo’s mind, just behind his eyes, there were many doors, but this particular one stood out before all others. He remembered exactly how the door planks had joined together in an almost seamless merging of the grain; he could see every knot and ring and dark whorl as if he were standing on the steps of this house on Neverness about to knock on the door. But he was not on Neverness. He stood before the door of an impossible house above a desolate and windswept beach, and the pattern of the whorls twisting through the shatterwood exactly matched the bright black whorls that burned through his memory.

How is it possible? he wondered. How is it possible that all things remember?

For a long time he stood there staring at the door and listening to the cries of the seagulls and other shore birds on the beach below. Then he made a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door. The sound of resonating wood was hollow and ancient. He knocked again, and the sound of bone striking against wood was lost to the greater sounds of the sweeping wind and the ocean that rang like a great deep bell far below him. A third time he knocked, loudly with much force, and he waited. When there was no answer, he tried the clear quartz doorknob, which turned easily in his hand. Then he opened the door and stepped across the threshold into the cold hallway inside.

‘Tamara, Tamara!’ he called out. But immediately, upon listening to the echoes that his voice made against the hall stones, he knew the house was empty. ‘Tamara, Tamara – why aren’t you home?’